Pie anxiety. Do you suffer from it? In reality, it isn’t the pie, but the piecrust that most people fear. When I am looking for something sweet and simple to bake, I rarely turn to pie.

Nancie McDermott, author of “Southern Pies: A Gracious Plenty of Pie Recipes, from Lemon Chess to Chocolate Pecan,” wants to change all that for me and everyone else who needs to be talked off the piecrust ledge. “Southern pies make the sweetest possible sense here and now. It’s never been easier to make them, with ready-to-drape, refrigerated piecrusts that work just fine.”

On U-T TV

Jill O’Connor will be on "Front Page" Wednesday at 7:45 a.m. showing how to make a “Chess Pie,” the classic Southern dessert. Watch on COX: 114; AT&T U-verse 17/1017

Sitting down with McDermott’s beautiful cookbook, one finds it easy to imagine a gentler time when the kitchen always smells like brown sugar and apples, and every day a homemade pie sits on the counter cooling on a folded kitchen towel, waiting to be sliced for an after-supper treat. In my mind, this romantic scenario doesn’t include driving across town to ballet practice, picking up a new pair of softball cleats, or tracking down the plumber. Baking a pie isn’t something anyone — even an experienced baker like myself — would attempt in the middle of a hectic week.

But when Nancie McDermott thinks about pie, the filling is the star, and the piecrust is the supporting actor. “It’s not that the crust doesn’t matter, and not that the ability to create wonderful, flaky golden piecrust out of flour, fat and water is not a great and worthy culinary art. It’s this: When someone out there decides they want to make a pie, insisting that they should in a righteous how-dare-you attitude, start by making a piecrust from scratch, is like saying that a person who wants to make a sandwich should start by kneading up a loaf of crusty bread.”

The glory of Southern pies is the fact that there is a pie for every season, every taste and every occasion. There are fancy meringue-capped butterscotch, lemon or coconut pies, fresh rhubarb-strawberry pies to usher in the flavors of spring, and sweet chess pies — the quintessential pie of the Southern kitchen.

“Chess pies at their most basic are eggs, sugar and butter,” McDermott told me. “They have a gooey, luscious quality and might be made with a syrup like molasses, sorghum or cane syrup and are the basis of the modern pecan pie.

“Brown Sugar Pie is just an old-school, everybody-does-it Southern pie. It’s the ‘stir with a fork’ genre I believe expresses the meaning of the phrase “easy as pie.”

I took the challenge late on a busy Wednesday afternoon with my family scattered in all directions and workmen ripping the ceiling from our master bedroom due to an unfortunate water heater mishap.

With a deep breath, and store-bought piecrust from Trader Joe’s, I proceeded to make Brown Sugar Pie, Leah Chase’s Lemon Chess Pie and, as a salute to the balmy spring weather, a Strawberry-Rhubarb Lattice Pie.